Revisiting the bottleneck hypothesis: The role of sexual identity development in the career exploration and decision-making of sexual minority college students

Highlights

• LGBQ sexual identity development has been associated with a career “bottleneck”.

• Applies social cognitive career theory to understanding sexual minorities' career development

• Examines the relation of sexual identity development with college students' career development

• Compares the career decisional process among sexual minority and heterosexual college students

Abstract

Hetherington's (1991) “bottleneck hypothesis”, which maintains that the process of sexual identity development can hamper the career development of sexual minority college students, has received periodic study. We revisited this hypothesis using the social cognitive model of career self-management (CSM; Lent & Brown, 2013) as a theoretical framework. An online survey of 225 sexual minority and 287 heterosexual college students did not reveal a robust between-group bottleneck effect. For example, no significant mean level differences were observed between the two groups in career decision-making process and outcome variables, such as career decision-making anxiety and level of career decidedness. In addition, a CSM-based path model of career decision-making was found to be invariant across the two student groups. However, a few noteworthy within-group patterns were observed. For example, a cluster analysis suggested the presence of two sexual minority sub-groups who differed regarding level of outness and difficulties negotiating their sexual identity. The more identity-integrated cluster reported less decisional anxiety and greater decidedness than their less identity-integrated peers. Indicators of identity conflict and level of disclosure were also linked to perceived support and goals for future career exploration. The pattern of findings suggests that sexual minority identity development in college does not represent a monolithic bottleneck to career development. However, a more nuanced bottleneck effect in career decision-making may be linked to students' intrapersonal and social comfort in negotiating their sexual minority identity. Implications for the bottleneck hypothesis and further research on sexual minority students' career exploration and decision-making are discussed.

Introduction

Sexual minority students often face unique challenges in college, such as heterosexist discrimination and negative campus climates (O'Neill et al., 2022; Rankin et al., 2010). These challenges have been associated with negative academic outcomes, such as perceiving less academic social support and having lower intentions to persist in college (Morris & Lent, 2019). Evidence suggests that identity related challenges also extend to career development. For example, sexual minority college students may perceive narrowed career options (Schneider & Dimito, 2010), less career decision-making support and guidance (Nauta et al., 2001), and greater career-related difficulties than do heterosexual students (Oswalt & Wyatt, 2011). Such findings highlight the need to better understand the interface between sexual identity and career development processes among sexual minority students in order to support their developmental needs in a culturally responsive manner (Lyons et al., 2021; Pope et al., 2004).

One influential perspective on sexual minority college students' career development is Hetherington's (1991) bottleneck hypothesis, which holds that the need to simultaneously navigate sexual identity development and career development may impede sexual minority students' progress at career development tasks. Specifically, she suggested that the sexual identity development process for many sexual minority students occurs during the college years. Key developmental tasks during this process include recognizing one's non-heterosexuality, finding a label for oneself, disclosing one's identity, and integrating sexual orientation into a broader image of the self (Levine & Evans, 1991). These formative aspects of sexual identity development may arouse psychological conflicts involving, for example, identity uncertainty and internalized homonegativity (Mohr & Fassinger, 2000; Mohr & Kendra, 2011).

Due to the stresses incurred from sexual identity development, Hetherington (1991) suggested that sexual minority students may only be able to devote limited energy to career development and, thus, progress in this domain may be deferred until the individual has reached a more advanced (integration) stage of their sexual identity development. This delay presumably creates a developmental bottleneck effect in which sexual minority students' sexual identity development competes with their career development, with many students needing to place a greater emphasis on such activities as finding a place in the sexual minority community and coping with negative emotions related to their sexual identity. Hetherington also suggested that navigating identity development can create barriers to engaging in career related activities, for example, where students are unwilling to disclose their sexual orientation to career counselors.

Some research supports the notion of a career bottleneck among college students and young adults. Tomlinson and Fassinger (2003) found that, for lesbian college students, attitudes suggesting advanced sexual identity development correlated positively with vocational purpose and development, though these attitudes generally did not predict either career-related outcome in multiple regression analyses. Schmidt and Nilsson (2006) found that a composite measure of “inner sexual identity conflict” correlated negatively with career maturity (r = −.30) and positively with career indecision (r = .21). Lyons et al. (2010) reported that people who endorsed their sexual identity development as being more important than their career development perceived significantly more sexual identity related barriers to vocational success.

More recently, Winderman et al. (2018) examined the relations of internalized heterosexism and identity concealment with indicators of career indecision. Interestingly, while they found significant bivariate correlations consistent with the bottleneck hypothesis, the relationships were not significant in multivariate regressions that included variables of protective factors, such as social support. Jang et al., 2020, Jang et al., 2021 also explored the bottleneck hypothesis by examining how positive aspects of identity development (identity affirmation and identity centrality), which may indicate advanced identity development, predict career decision-making self-efficacy. They found that these variables predicted career decision-making self-efficacy via the mediating variables of self-compassion and social support. Russon and Schmidt (2014) found that identity authenticity predicted career-related outcomes among sexual minority students.

Despite the accumulation of findings offering at least partial support for the bottleneck hypothesis, several limitations of the existing research base might be noted. In particular, sexual identity development has typically not been defined or measured consistently across bottleneck studies. For instance, researchers tend to focus on the psychological or intrapersonal aspects of sexual identity development while omitting its social aspects (i.e., coming out to others; cf. Levine & Evans, 1991). Even where the social side of sexual identity management is considered (e.g., Winderman et al., 2018), it may not be assessed in a sufficiently detailed manner (e.g., see Meidlinger & Hope's, 2014, discussion of conceptualizing “outness”). Another common limitation involves the ways in which career development has been defined and assessed. For example, existing studies have often focused on limited predictors (e.g., career decision-making self-efficacy; Jang et al., 2021) or outcomes of career indecision (Winderman et al., 2018).

As a result of inconsistency in conceptualizing and assessing sexual identity development and/or career development, it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions across studies about the impact of the career bottleneck, where it may occur developmentally, and how it may be offset. Such limitations also make it difficult to derive meaningful recommendations for career interventions with sexual minority students and young adults. These observations suggest the need for additional research on the bottleneck hypothesis that (a) assesses both social and psychological aspects of sexual identity development and (b) measures career development multidimensionally, ideally drawing on comprehensive models of career development. The present study was designed to address these two issues.

In addition to conceptual and methodological considerations regarding past research on the bottleneck hypothesis, it seems reasonable to note historical developments that may have mitigated some of the conflict between sexual identity and career developmental processes between 1991 and the present. Indeed, it is possible that the degree of societal stigma linked to sexual orientation may have abated somewhat in more recent years. For instance, though only 48 % of U.S. adults felt that lesbian and gay sexual relationships should be legal in a 1992 Gallup poll, that percentage had increased to 79 % by 2021 (Gallup, Inc., 2022a). Thus, many sexual minority persons, at least within the U.S., may face less stigma and, thus, experience a less fraught process of sexual identity development than they may have in previous decades.

There is also evidence of an increasing trend for young people to begin the sexual identity development process prior to college. For example, in a 2013 Pew survey of sexual minority adults, the median age of initial sexual identity disclosure was 21 for respondents aged 50 years or older, compared to a median age of 17 for respondents who were 18–29 years old (Taylor, 2013). A recent meta-analysis reported the mean age of such disclosure as 19.6 years (Hall et al., 2021), but means tend to be affected more by outliers than are median values. Given larger (if uneven) shifts in tolerance regarding sexual minority identities and in the coming out process, it may be useful to revisit the bottleneck hypothesis by comparing a contemporary sample of sexual minority and heterosexual college students in terms of their progress at career decision making. Such research may help to illuminate the degree to which sexual minority students experience a categorical career bottleneck relative to their heterosexual peers. It is also important to explore within-group variations in the experience of career development hurdles and facilitators among sexual minority students.

The bottleneck hypothesis takes a developmental view of progress, or stagnation, at negotiating career tasks that are normative for late adolescents and young adults. Super proposed that those in this age range navigate an Exploration Stage in which they attempt to explore themselves and the world of work, leading to provisional occupational decisions (Hartung, 2021). The bottleneck effect thus represents a developmental delay in the general pattern of career exploration and decision-making. The career self-management model of social cognitive career theory (CSM; Lent & Brown, 2013) adopts a complementary developmental view of career behavior that may be useful for re-examining the bottleneck hypothesis. The CSM model is aimed at understanding the adaptive behaviors that people employ to anticipate and adjust to a wide array of career-related tasks, including the career exploration and decision-making of college students (Lent et al., 2017; Lent et al., 2019a; Lent et al., 2019b). The CSM model may be useful for observing potential career bottlenecking because it identifies intermediate markers of productive career exploration and decision-making, such as decisional self-efficacy, and several outcomes, such as career decidedness, that reflect focal points for impediments to the career development process.

The CSM model includes six classes of predictors: (a) personality traits and affective dispositions that predispose one to experience pleasant or unpleasant emotions, (b) contextual supports, referring to the resources and social supports available for pursuing one's goals and building self-efficacy, (c) prior learning experiences, which are experiences that contribute to one's sense of self-efficacy or outcome expectations, (d) self-efficacy, or confidence in one's ability to successfully “manage specific tasks necessary for career preparation, entry, adjustment, or change” (Lent & Brown, 2013, p. 561), (e) outcome expectations, or beliefs about the outcomes of pursuing a particular career related action, and (f) goals, referring to the intentions to perform career related actions.

There are three classes of outcomes in the model as it has been applied to the domain of career decision-making: (a) exploratory/decisional actions, (b) affective outcomes (e.g., anxiety), and (c) decisional status. According to the model, those with more favorable affective traits and greater levels of contextual supports, beneficial learning experiences, self-efficacy, and positive outcome expectations are more likely to develop career exploration goals, to translate these goals into actions, to experience more positive affective outcomes (e.g., greater decisional comfort), and to make satisfactory career decisions. Fig. 1 displays the CSM model as applied to career exploration and decision-making.

Good support has been found for the CSM model as applied to college students' career exploration and decision-making (Kleine et al., 2021). For example, Lent et al.'s (2016) results supported the hypothesized links of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and social support to exploratory goals, and of self-efficacy to decisional anxiety and career decidedness. They also found that social support was linked to decisional anxiety and career decidedness indirectly, via self-efficacy. Other model-testing studies have found that self-efficacy is directly linked to career decidedness and is also linked to career exploration goals directly (Lent et al., 2017) and/or indirectly via outcome expectations (Ireland & Lent, 2018). Lent et al. (2019a) found support for several of the posited longitudinal pathways in the model, such as the relations of time 1 or time 2 self-efficacy to subsequent levels of career exploration goals and actions, decisional anxiety, and career decidedness.

We reasoned that the CSM model could be applicable to the experiences of sexual minority students because it accounts for universal factors, such as self-efficacy, while also allowing for the addition of predictors that are unique to sexual minority students. Thus, to explore potential between-group bottleneck factors, the present study compared heterosexual and sexual minority students' career exploration and decision-making using key CSM predictors and outcome variables. Additional sexual identity-specific variables were also added to the model to allow us to examine within-group factors (e.g., identity conflict, identity concealment) that may uniquely predict career development indicators in the sexual minority group.

Hetherington (1991) used a conceptualization of sexual identity development created by Levine and Evans (1991), who combined the common factors of multiple theories (e.g., Cass, 1979; Lee, 1977; Milton & MacDonald, 1984). These included psychological factors, such as internalized homonegativity or self-labeling of sexual orientation, and social factors, such as coming out and exploring the sexual minority community. Their model had four stages: (a) self-awareness, the process of recognizing one's non-heterosexuality, (b) self-labeling, the process of identifying oneself as a sexual minority individual, (c) community involvement and disclosure, which is the process of immersing oneself in the LGBTQ community and disclosing one's sexual identity, and (d) identity integration, or incorporating one's sexual identity within the larger self-concept. Hetherington posited that the bottleneck posed by sexual identity on career development would resolve once a student had reached the integration stage of sexual identity development.

Following Hetherington's (1991) and Levine and Evans' (1991) work, we incorporated both psychological and social aspects of sexual identity development, while building on Schmidt and Nilsson's (2006) research. The latter had represented sexual identity conflict (an indicator of psychological identity development) with the identity confusion, internalized homonegativity, and difficult process subscales of Mohr and Fassinger's (2000) Lesbian and Gay Identity Scale. Our study included these three aspects of sexual identity conflict as well as two social aspects of sexual identity development: identity disclosure and concealment. The resulting set of measures offered a multidimensional way to test the bottleneck hypothesis, thereby allowing us to address some of the limitations of prior research that we had noted earlier.

We conceptualized sexual identity development and career development as co-occurring processes, with each encompassing multiple dimensions. In the career realm, we framed developmental progress (or lack thereof) in terms of the core process and outcome variables of the CSM model of career decision-making (Lent & Brown, 2013). This represents an effort to examine possible bottleneck effects of sexual identity development on multiple dimensions of career development, organized within the conceptual umbrella of an overarching theoretical framework. We also explored the possible presence of a developmental bottleneck to career decision-making from several angles, both in terms of (a) differences between heterosexual and sexual minority students and (b) differences within the latter group as a function of their relative comfort or difficulty in negotiating the sexual identity development process.

This study combines discovery-oriented and theory-testing objectives and examines career decisional progress in terms of both mean differences and differential patterns of variable relations that may be attributable to sexual identity or, more specifically, to the ways in which students negotiate the sexual identity development process. We first examined mean differences in career decisional predictor and outcome variables between samples of sexual minority and heterosexual students. While we approached this question without specific hypotheses, a clear pattern of differences favoring the latter group (e.g., higher levels of self-efficacy and career decidedness among heterosexual students) would imply the presence of a bottleneck effect, though it would not in and of itself illuminate the basis for this effect.

Second, following Hetherington's assertion that the bottleneck is attributable to difficulties managing simultaneous developmental processes, we examined the possibility that any bottleneck effect in career development may owe less to sexual minority status per se than to the challenges of engaging concurrently in sexual identity and career decisional processes, especially when one feels unresolved about one's sexual identity (e.g., presence of internal identity conflict and social concealment). In such a scenario, there could be a developmental competition for finite psychological resources, with at least a temporary slowing of progress at career decision-making. To explore the hypothesized within-group bottleneck, we used cluster analysis to try to identify sub-groups of students who experience a more and less integrated sense of identity, or comfort, as a sexual minority group member; we then compared their mean levels on the career decisional process and outcome variables. Following the bottleneck hypothesis, we anticipate that students with a less integrated sense of sexual identity may exhibit relatively less career decisional progress.

Third, we examined the extent to which the social cognitive predictors would differentially predict the decisional criteria by sexual identity status. Although we assumed that the CSM predictions would hold across the two groups, substantial differences in how the predictors are functioning or in the variance explained in the criteria might suggest the presence of a bottleneck effect to the extent that the differences reflect a consistent pattern favoring the heterosexual group. In particular, differential relational patterns might indicate where the bottleneck is occurring but not necessarily why it is occurring. We, thus, tested for invariance in the path model predicting exploratory goals, decisional anxiety, and decisional status across the two groups.

Fourth, once again examining the within-group aspect of the bottleneck hypothesis, we examined sexual identity development as a set of within-group variables that might shed light on which specific aspects of the sexual identity experience, or its management, help explain any blockage of career decisional progress in sexual minority students. This aspect of the study was exploratory, focusing on the incremental validity of the sexual identity development variables, above and beyond the CSM variables, in predicting the three decisional outcome variables. Although we did not frame specific hypotheses, identification of uniquely useful predictors might suggest specific mechanisms through which the simultaneous negotiation of sexual identity and career development operate to impede the career decisional progress of sexual minority students.

Social cognitive career theory (SCCT) has previously been used to study various aspects of career development in sexual minority persons, such as the academic satisfaction of college students (Morris & Lent, 2019) and the sexual identity management strategies of adult workers (e.g., Lent et al., 2021). In the present study, we employed the CSM model of SCCT as a framework for exploring where potential career bottlenecks may exist. We also conceptualized sexual identity development as a process that includes both social and psychological aspects. A heterosexual student sample was included to explore whether and to what extent sexual minority students are disadvantaged in their career decisional progress relative their heterosexual peers. We focused on the core CSM predictors of career exploration goals, decisional anxiety, and career decidedness, omitting personality traits because there is little reason to suspect they will differentiate the career decision-making of sexual minority and heterosexual students. Also, as in other novel applications of the CSM model (e.g., Lent et al., 2016), we tested a streamlined version of the model, omitting more distal elements (e.g., background contextual affordances, experiential sources of self-efficacy beliefs), which allowed us to contain the scope of this initial extension of the model to the bottleneck hypothesis.